Customer Reviews

Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy

5 star:		(38)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Amid all the discussion of Eno's innovations, people sometimes forget that he has the one quality that REALLY matters for a musician: personality. I can't vouch for his "ambient" works because I've never had the patience to listen to anything like that, but the four "song" albums he made in the 70s are loaded with personality. Eno could be weird and idiosyncratic, but there is also plenty of humor and even warmth in this music. And "Taking Tiger Mountain" was his greatest achievement, in my opinion.

There is something weird and mysterious going on in every one of these songs, many of which refer to some sort of quest. The overall feel is something like that of a child playing spy games, although often the imagery is disturbing or menacing in a way that no child could have imagined. Memorable phrases are constantly jumping out at you:

"Certain streets have certain corners
Sooner or later we'll turn yours."

"Sweet Regina's on the plane a Newsweek on her knees
While far below the curlews call from strangely stunted trees."

"Let me just point out discreetly though you never learn.
All those tawdry late night weepies I can make you weep more cheaply."

And then there's the sinister lullaby "Put a Straw Under Baby," which I've learned was inspired by Eno's Catholic upbringing and can be read as a child's misinterpretation of religious symbolism.

The music all has a weird texture, even though most of it was produced by traditional rock and roll instruments. "Third Uncle" and "The True Wheel" both contain some truly wicked, flipped-out lead guitar work by Phil Manzanera. The entire album is filled with catchy pop melodies and instrumental hooks that will draw you in immediately, and there is plenty of detail in both sound and words to keep you coming back time after time. This is one of the most treasured albums in my collection.

(Note to Eno fans: If you have not read Eric Tamm's book "Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound," you need to get ahold of a copy, whether at a library or on the Web. I believe it is out of print. It's one of the best books I've read about a musician or group.)

Lyrically Eno plays little narrative games,"...and the opium farmers sell dreams to obscure fraternities...down in the orchard monkeys and uncles p-laying their games like it seems they always have done....China my China I wandered around for years and you're still here"(China my China).
Musically the sounds are a mix of the familiar Manzanera guitar and Mackay sax(his two old Roxy Music chums)but also unfamiliar Eno synthesizers which make some very appealing noise and various other unfamiliar aural delights from all manner of unidentifiable sources.
There are so many lyric devices and different sounds that this album feels like a catalogue or manual. Perhaps the Eno equivalent of the Little Red Book.
The beautiful synthesizer phrasings on the closing number Taking Tiger Mountain could easily fit on Another Green World.
Other songs are pure pop heaven though, when Eno sings "Looking for a certain ratio-o-o-o" you can hear that he has learned something from Bryan Ferry. A vocal style Talking Heads' David Byrne will also use.
Fat Lady of Limbourg is perhaps the star of the show but not by much as every song is a winning combination of odd verse and even odder backing noises. Though its experimental its also fun and listenable as any pop record if not more so. There is plenty here to challenge the playful mind that always is looking for something new, Enos sound terrains are always intriguing, and also there is humor, especially in the words, and a great sense of wandering into the unknown because logical thinking and music making patterns have been left behind. Although familiar things keep popping up, like references to Japan or China, and cold war spy apparatus like microcameras and spectrographs, they are merely there to add drama and a touch of reality c.1974, but only a touch. Tiger Mountain is not to be located on a map.

It is hard for me to review Tiger Mountain without resorting to the most fawning, gushing language of which fandom is capable. I will attempt here to be a bit restrained and objective, but the plain fact is that if some supremely evil dictator decreed tomorrow that no citizen could own more than a single CD, I would choose this one as my lifelong companion: It has beauty, excitement, charm, sensuality, intelligence, and -- oh yes, by the way -- mystery.

Tiger Mountain is Eno's magnum opus. Though Another Green World is probably his stylistic apex, that work lacks Tiger's emotional highs and overall resonance and energy. Though his first solo album redefined what popular music could be, this one puts the polish on that initial redefinition.

From apoplectic onset of Burning Airlines, one is seduced into a blurry Wonderland of connotation and denotation, meaning and nonsense, wakefulness, dreams and nightmares, where one becomes complicit in one's own confusion until the slow polar sweep of the title track fades out. Is this music or drug addiction?

Eno's mastery of sonic texture is never more apparent; his alchemical blending of timbres both traditional and novel never more glittering. Having once heard the counterpoint of Robert Wyatt's innocent falsetto and Portsmouth Sinfonia's sweetly off-key cadences, is it possible either to forget Put A Straw Under Baby or to imagine the song scored in any other fashion?

The redolence and wit of the lyrics as well is unsurpassed, invoking a broad nexus of meanings without enforcing any one in particular. Despite their restive refusal to be pinned down, the words are often startlingly memorable. For instance, it is delightful if profitless to speculate upon what piety may be contained in: "There's a brain in the table/There's a heart in the chair/And they all live in Jesus/It's a family affair."

Released in 1974, Tiger Mountain has aged well. Twenty-five years later, this creative and influential rock endeavor does not show any signs of staleness. On repeated listenings, new surprises continue to well up from its depths. What more could one ask of any long-term relationship?

This CD has been on my list of all time favorites since it was released-on LP. The dense, intricate musicianship, the songwriting, the concept-all feel clever and hardly dated even after all these years. Tight guitar work from Phil Manzanera and the Portsmouth Sinfonia's violins pepper this recording with hidden surprises. Eno's lyrics convey just the right touch of world-weariness edged with sly humor. At the time of its release-Nixon's visit and the US' first glimpse of China-it matched up well with the image of China as a mysterious, somewhat inaccessible, ancient and strange land.

That Eno's recapitulation of the "wall of sound" took place well before the advent of the digital era-if I recall correctly his main tool was a pair of reel-to-reel tapedecks- is astonishing. Even more worth a listen on the cleaned up audio. About the only thing missing from the original LP version are the endless crickets at the end of "The Great Pretender" as the needle wound down around the plinth!

They removed the "noise" at the beginning of Third Uncle.
It was definitely part of the song. I'm very glad I held on to the unremastered version in the cheap plastic case.

I would say this is his best album (including all the ambient records)

It's cliche to refer to a musician as "ahead of their time", but Eno was certainly ahead of mine. I bought the LP version of this when it first came out, and while I enjoyed it, I feel like only now do I finally "get it". Eno has created such a deep volume of work between his pop records, his ambient work and of course his production for U2 and others that his talent should be obvious. This record, however, has always been at the top of my list. To my ear it was good then and it's great now. Artists from Doug Hilsinger to Shivaree have covered his songs, but none of them can create the soundscapes that Eno did. If you only buy one Eno record in your lifetime, let this be it.

It must be noted, before everything else, that this is a transition album of Brian Eno's, but one that ended up not completing itself. _Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)_ is a marvelous look at Eno's waning interest in subverting "conventional" pop music, and his growing involvement in his sonic experiments taking on a life of their own. It's not, however, a reconciliation of the two (that would come later, with _Before and After Science_), and because of this, this album has the tendancy to grow mildly repetitive. However, like most other music visionaries, Eno's "off" days are ultimately more interesting and worthwhile than the best output of other musicians.

_Taking Tiger Mountain_ is the sound of Eno's shift towards pure experimentalism in music, the particular facets of which he is elaborating upon are closely related to his Roxy Music roots and the brilliantly oddball _Here Come the Warm Jets._ Starting with his next release, he would begin to elaborate on a different side of his past work--his accompaniment to musicians like Robert Fripp, only without the "lead" instrumentation. This album was as close as Eno got to recording a full-blown avant-garde/experimental release. Although those who enjoy the ridiculousness of _Here Come the Warm_ jets will find this release to be somewhat more serious, it's not a departure, but an expansion on certain aural aspects of its precedessor. Nevertheless, for the hardcore _Warm Jets_ fans, Eno throws in "The True Wheel," a song that, with its vocal sound effects and nursery-rhyme campiness, could rival the posturing of "The Paw-Paw Negro Blowtorch."

As an experimental album, however, _Taking Tiger Mountain_ is richly rewarding--because in it, Brian Eno sets the standard for all conceptual-pop releases to follow. Eno manipulates his free-associative lyrics into stanzas that, although they state nothing explicitly, seem to be dark and sometimes apocalyptic ("China My China"). He engages in meta-cognition within the lyrics ("The fingers fall/To make percussion over solos" immediately preceeds a rhythm of shakers and spoons played over a guitar solo). He alludes to the campy lyrical content of his past work, and wends his way around alliterative labyrinths in very much the same way as the album's predecessor ("But her sense of taste is such that she'll distinguish with her tongue the subtleties a spectrograph would miss"). He can even induce a laugh or two in the process ("I got the job because I was so mean/While somehow appearing so kind"). The music doesn't disappoint, either, from the minimalist, baritone saxophone-driven "The Fat Lady of Limbourg" to the wonderfully unlistenable "Put a Straw Under Baby"--featuring the Portsmouth Sinfonia playing a solo in which they cannot maintain the tempo of the song (and which is out-of-tune, to boot).

Given this release, one has to wonder what Eno would have come up with next, if indeed anything at all, if he had continued on the same track. Instead, he followed a trail that ended up with the creation of ambient as a genre of music and the total alteration of the face of music in general--something that Eno, even at that early a date, was experiencing for at least the third time.

Movie making has almost caught up with this album. To the point that it is almost possible to conceptualize the mystic/internationalist/martial arts/james bond/montenegro type movie that would need to be created to deserve this album as a soundtrack.

This is an album about a group of hobbits on a secret mission in south east asia during the fourth century bc. Their adventures have a jungian effect on a modern couple caught in a typically deceitful relationship.

The woman is an international double agent, born to japanese parents in sweden. The male lead is a martial arts master who can fly over roofs and commune with the hobbits when necessary. Ultimately, they're not trying to save the world, they're simply trying to reconcile their relationship and be true to their own buddha nature.

The hobbits, though are on a doomed mission which is referred to by name in the album's title. As in life, there are hundreds of characters (including -- but not limited to -- small children, cute pets, boring in-laws, fat people, whales, chinese royalty, a brothel in new orleans, ugly pets, large children, thugs, intellectuals, writers and martyrs) in the movie who have minor speaking roles. If you watched this movie for the rest of your life, you still wouldn't know how it ends.

It won't be out on DVD for another 20 years. Buy the soundtrack now. Warning: when released in the future this movie will contain realistic scenes about everyday life that everyone will find disturbing.

Everyone is familiar with Eno's famous production collaborations with Talking Heads, David Bowie and of course, U2, but I think people sometimes forget how good a pop writer Eno can be. This is Eno at his quirkiest and most catchy. The record is deep with gems.

i have all four of the eno album that where reissued this past year [04] and i just fell in love with this one the most it just reminds me of a movie with messed up scenes. it moves beautifully across the room.i can't stop playing the album. it just grabbed on to me from the first song to the last.i'm a big fan of roxy music, which eno was part of for two albums, but this is just so different and u kinda know why he left other than the fact that him an bryan didn't like each other much. this is an album to get if not all.